Conversations at work recently have turned again and again to consciousness and self-awareness (what, you thought “Android” was just a phone? ;) ). Now, I’m not going to belabor the point with discussions of artificial intelligence and yet another amateur’s resummarization of Searle’s Chinese Room[1]. Instead, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness in groups of humans.
A bullet-point braindump:
- As background, remember that short story in Godel Escher Bach, where the ant-eater communicated with the colony of ants (not the ants themselves, but the colony), and ate certain individual ants as a way to shape the colony into something that’s more intelligently connected?
- It’s a cliche’d remark that groups of humans begin to resemble organisms in their own right. Corporations seek after the good of the corporation rather than the good of any of its individuals. Cultures grow, intermingle, reproduce spawning new cultures. OK, so these macro-groups of humans are animals, that’s for sure. But are they self-aware Conscious? Would we recognize it if they were?
- It’s interesting when a group of people who’ve been meeting for a while realize that they are in fact behaving as a group, and in turn have a group identity. Is this awareness of group identity the same as self-awareness in the group? (answer: I don’t think so, this is something different).
- To extend the brain metaphor, imagine humans to be the neurons in a larger collective brain. Urgh, the speed of signal transition along axon-dendrite gap is horribly slow. What effect does this slowness have? Also, humans are damn intelligent signal processors compared to neurons. What effect would our individual intelligences have on the larger structure?
- Would such a self-aware “organism” think thoughts that are entirely separate and entirely transcendent above the thoughts of its constituents?
- Scale? Seems to be the general belief that intelligence is the emergent result of massive amounts of highly, highly interconnected neurons. How many people do you need in a group before it can be considered an organism? A self-aware organism? Is the interconnectedness of humans even on a large enough order of magnitude to support a functionally processing organism? What are such an organism’s inputs, outputs? Would human sub-organizations specialize into computational functional tools, similar to how neurons in the brain are specialized into groups like the PFC, the amygdala, etc?
- I imagine an extraterrestrial coming to the earth, and conversing with society as opposed to individuals. That would be an interesting story. But not the kind of sci-fi that would entertain a puny human mind, though, that’s for sure.
Hmm, I’ll have to think more about this… so many premature thoughts… And most of them the result of only 4 hours of sleep for the last couple days. My apologies, dear anonymous reader, for the unpolished words, the undeveloped concepts, the flaws. “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.”
[1] (In any case, I love Ben Goertzel’s take on the situation, which, to paraphrase: “When the time comes, and you’re actually arguing with the computer whether it is self-aware or not, then the point is already moot, isn’t it?”)
Talking to a friend last week, an interesting idea came up: We don’t just consume information, information also consumes us.
My attention is a scarce resource, and different ideas, media, schools of thought, compete for it. (This is what makes multidisciplinarity hard).
It makes me think twice about metaphors for learning that compare research and knowledge acquisition to foraging for food. What if, instead of likening ourselves to the predators and farmers, we liken ourselves to the prey and the farmed.
There’s plenty of discussion of memes as pseudo-genetic entities (evolving, reproducing, self-transmitting)… but underlying this is the idea that we are the medium of transmission, we are the host to the virus.
It certainly puts a new spin on the way I look at sites like All Consuming.
I don’t like this metaphor of being consumed, it feels too passive and fatalistic to me. But maybe it’s true.
hmm, haven’t posted anything in a while.
a smattering of notes from life:
- my mother-in-law just took a trip to Yunnan, China to take photos. I’ve posted some of them in this flickr set
- went on ISI’s bi-annual AI retreat a few weekends ago. a few interesting things that I may fill out later:
- SIMILE (project aiming towards “inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services”. distributed semantic web, like a delicious of metadata sets/organizational structures).
- Craig’s group, researching mashups of mashups
- my first taste of lisp programming (gives (me (of-type (headache big))). (or something like that)
and now, for some lunacy: last night ahd a conversation with friends about the magnetosphere around earth. this morning i woke up wondering, if the field extends far enough–say, to the moon–if we could lay down some long electrical wires and generate “free” (err, compared to the oversized kinetic energy of the moon) electricity as the moon orbits through the field. hmmm.
Came across Newsmap this afternoon, a google maps mashup by Ben O’Neill today that plots locations mentioned in BBC news on a map of the world.
The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with regional coloring based on density of news events in that area. You’d need a few hacks to make things look nice (normalization for standard-level-of-news per area (different areas of the world have different minimum levels of media coverage) … smoothing so that local news-concentration influences regional news-concentration). And a gradient would do a lot more for visualization than these discrete news-event-bubbles (but I realize that the google maps api limits you to location bubble markers, and remixers are limitted to the tools at hand).
I love to see non-art becoming art. To this day, one of my favorite random conversations was with Tom and danah at a conference a year or so ago, where we discussed a fellow information addict who had covered all the walls of his house with bookshelfs full of books. Information, knowledge became art–and it evolved so both organically and unobtrusively.
This post on boingboing, “Google: our print scan program has no hidden AI agenda”, which points to this ZDNet story cracks me up.
Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence.
When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about omnipotent and malign computers was underway now, Levick admitted that such concerns were more abundant, but insisted that Google’s core philosophy of “Don’t be evil” guides all its actions.
“I think that goes back to the concept that these technologies can actually be empowering and good for the world if the companies implementing them are good,” he said. “Could some of these technologies be used for bad purposes? Yes. But will they by us? No.”
Hehe. As someone who works with AI every day, and who knows the prenatal state of natural language processing and so-called “strong AI”, it cracks me up to see public fears of “omnipotent and malign computers”.
Sigh.
I have been thinking about differences in media, specifically differences in the way we value them.
Everything about a book says “I value this”. An author will invest more time/effort writing a book than a magazine article or a newspaper column. Books are made of better materials, expected to be kept around the house for years and passed on to the grandkids eventaully. Likewise I pay more for a book. While books might be about current events, the majority are meant to be more timeless. I am less tolerant of typographic/layout errors in books than in other media.
Magazines are a midpoint between books and newspapers. They’re printed on material that will last a relatively long while–but no one keeps them around for more than a couple months. I expect good, artistic layout from magazines. With a few exceptions, they’re printed to be consumed, enjoyed once or twice, and discarded. They are relatively timely.
Newspapers? The only reason I keep a typical newspaper for more than a day is because I forget to throw it out. They are the timeliest of information, so much that they’re up-to-date and out-of-date very quickly. The production cycle of newspapers versus books is an interesting contrast seen in this light.
Of course, all this is yesterday’s news. What really has me thinking about things is what the web is doing to all this. Long web page or little blog post, wikipedia or mefi entry… All the traditional factors that we use to gauge value are being remapped. Advertisements are in the long as well as the short. Likewise constraints are being tweaked. We throw out newspapers because they’re of little use–but would we keep magazines around if we had all the space in the world? How do we choose what to keep and what to discard in this new world? Media: the long, medium, and short can all blur and co-exist. Bandwidth is so cheap there’s no difference in production cost.
More thoughts on this when I’m less sleepy.
A good op-ed was in the NY Times a couple days ago: Recipe for Destruction.
The article doesn’t address this point specifically, but i think a manhattan-project like thing that this article recommends is the only way that we’re ever going to get a cure for the common cold.
In the existing System, there’s just no economic motivation for a cold or flu cure-all–the existing medicine industry is too entrenched in providing maskers-of-symptoms, cures for specialized diseases, etc, that they’d never want to give up a revenue source for something like a panacaea.
I think part of the reason I enjoy programming so much is that there is no entropy in what I create. Information gets out of date, standards change, yes, but that’s just a synchronization problem, not a Universe problem.
Or is entropy a bad thing? It’s the enemy of order and structure, yes. But it does keep things clean, and as the old stuff wears out, it gives us an excuse and a drive to innovate the new.
Huh.
Cold-medicine induced altered mental-state yesterday gave me an interesting idea:
Right now all the mapping companies (mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps) use NavTeq to gather data. Once (if ever) cell phone usage data tied to GSM becomes public (a la MIT’s Mobile Landscape), I wonder if you can aggregate data of people going from point A to point B, and lookup solutions to the travelling salesman problem.
Similar to the concept of emergent garden paths in landscape architecture and the wisdom of crowds, let’s let public agreement decide the best way to go from one place to another.
What do you think?
More interesting reading:
Wikipedia on the Wisdom of Crowds
IAWiki on Emergent Architecture
The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0
–Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk novel by Charles Stross
A good read, and Creative-Commons-Released-For-Free-Download. Aside from a too-explicit-for-my-puritan-tastes S&M scene near the beginning, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in this book. It’s only 160 short pages, but the prose is so thick and packed with ideas that I spent more time reading than with most books 3 times its length. Stross is refreshingly technologically literate (you’ll find no refrains of Gibson writing Neuromancer on an old typewriter here), and the book is packed with ideas of both near-future and post-singularity-future life. And it’s brimming over with good-natured satire directed towards this current era (awkward adolescence of human culture that it is). I love the quote at the top of this entry. “Economics 2.0″, I’m still chuckling…
